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The All-New Wild Adventures of Doc Savage (from Altus Press)

02-20-2018, 05:30 PM

Has anybody read any of these books featuring new Doc Savage stories?

I haven't tried them myself (yet) since I still need to find my old Doc Savage paperbacks I bought back in the 1970s (I know they're somewhere around here . . . ), but there's one that particularly piques my interest.

"When millionaire Lamont Cranston and attorney Ham Brooks are kidnapped by gunmen driving a black hearse, it spells trouble for Doc Savage. Trouble with compound interest when Cranston’s personal lawyer is mysteriously murdered before he can consult with celebrated criminologist George Clarendon—who is secretly The Shadow!"

Comment

They are pretty good. I think a lot of them are based on notes or unfinished Dent stories.

According to Will Murray, The Sinister Shadow is actually a reconfiguration of Lester Dent's original manuscript (which was later revised by Walter Gibson, and published as The Shadow novel "The Golden Vulture"). Street & Smith had given Dent the opportunity to submit a story, ostensibly as a possible understudy "Maxwell Grant" to Gibson. But secretly, they were testing Dent's ability to script a new character-based title (which turned out to be Doc Savage, based on a short character outline by S&S publisher Henry Ralston). Happy with the results they saw in Dent's tryout Shadow novel as submitted, it was nevertheless shelved for a number of years, since Walter Gibson proved to be a workhorse who had no trouble keeping up with The Shadow's twice-a-month publication frequency. When there was finally a need to dust it off for publication, the character had changed significantly from Gibson's earliest published Shadow novels on which Dent based his submitted manuscript, so Gibson rewrote portions of it to bring it in line with how the Shadow had evolved up to that point in time.

Murry took the unrevised version of Dent's manuscript, and did his own revision to include an encounter between the Shadow and Doc Savage as the crux around which the story revolves, changing details to along the way (and also including a chunk of an unrelated Doc Savage outline of Dent's that never came to fruition) so that the resulting work would bear even less resemblance to Gibson's revision as it was published under the title "The Golden Vulture".